It is common to use a configuration management database (CMDB) to store information about an organization's assets and the relationships between different assets. In this context, information about an asset is captured and stored in a software object referred to as configuration item (CI). As used herein, a CI can represent any conceivable resource or component including software, hardware, documentation, facilities and personnel, as well as any combination of these. The process of configuration management seeks to specify, control and track an organization's assets (including changes made to them) in a comprehensive and systematic fashion through the use of configuration items.
For configuration management purposes, an instance of a CI is created and stored in a CMDB for each asset that an organization wishes to manage. It will be appreciated that a single “asset” may include a large number of individually tracked components, each of which may have their own corresponding CI instance. For example, a single desktop computer system may be associated with more than 500 CIs (e.g., one each for the keyboard, mouse, display screen, hard disk, network adapter, graphics card and installed software, including all patches and updates). At this level of granularity, to identify and track each asset, for even a relatively small organization, can require many millions of CIs. Large organizations can require hundreds of millions of CIs to represent their environment. The effort to create and manage this many CIs (in terms of storage and human effort) can be very large.
In the prior art, the problem of tracking this many CIs is avoided by an organization choosing to simply not track items that are of minor interest (e.g., the number of file cabinets it owns or word processing applications that it has purchased and installed). Unfortunately, this can lead to an incomplete accounting of an organization's assets. Thus, it would be beneficial to provide a mechanism that allows an organization to track all of their assets without incurring the storage and management overhead of creating individual configuration item instances for each unique asset to be tracked.